It’s common knowledge that Tesla vehicles store and transmit data back to the company’s Fremont, California home base, but a hacker working on a wrecked Model S just discovered something startling.
In an interview published by Inverse (h/t to Hybrid Cars), North Carolina computer programmer Jason Hughes claims that Tesla’s Autopilot system actually records video. While working on a center display unit from a wrecked Model S, Hughes found footage of the vehicle’s crash. (Read More…)
Your faithful four-wheeled companion — the one that costs you an arm and a leg but you still love it — has the data-gathering potential to make your life a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Researchers have found that a car’s computer network can identify a driver just by the way they operate the vehicle. Even something as simple as the brake pedal can pinpoint who’s behind the wheel, according to a report published in Wired. (Read More…)
If you want your nefarious plan to stay on the down low, try not to make a PowerPoint presentation on it.
That’s an obvious takeaway from the New York Times report that details a bombshell discovery made by investigators probing documents and laptops related to Volkswagen’s diesel emissions scandal. (Read More…)
Mitsubishi’s fuel economy scandal blew up yesterday after the automaker admitted it has issued misleading mileage data since C+C Music Factory was at the top of the charts.
The scandal that started with inflated mileage numbers on a single minicar one week ago now extends to all Japanese market Mitsubishi vehicles sold over the past quarter century. Reuters is reporting that the automaker compiled fuel economy data using U.S. standards, rather than the Japanese standards that factor in much more city driving. (Read More…)
Your vehicle’s technology is enslaving you, and Toyota wants to help you break free.
Today, Toyota has become the latest automaker to create a subsidiary tasked with generating new technology and innovation for its parent company.
Called Toyota Connected Inc., the venture is a collaboration with Microsoft that will serve as a data science and mobile technology hob for the world’s largest automaker. The plan is to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology to “humanize” the driving experience and make vehicles’ high-tech abilities less intrusive and more useful. (Read More…)
Started in New York City in 1967 as an offshoot of the Chicago Music Show, the Consumer Electronics Show has grown to capture the interest and intrigue of automakers. Las Vegas now has two auto shows.
That, Volkswagen’s unending stream of German-accented apologies, why Ford might not be hitching itself to Google and how you can become an automotive journalist* … after the break!
In 2008, Congress passed a tax bill that would provide a credit of up to $7,500 for customers who purchase plug-in vehicles as a way to encourage adoption of cleaner vehicles. The credit would last in full for the first 200,000 units an automaker sold, then phased out over the course of 12 months.
The problem? The agency responsible for handling the credit, the Internal Revenue Service, has no clue as to where things stand as far as that cap is concerned, despite every automaker that sells a plug-in model reporting the figures every quarter, as required by law.
Getting decent conclusions from very limited data is the sort of thing of which Nobel Prizes are made. What you’re about to read won’t be Nobel-worthy; however, I believe it will help you understand how fast the Hellcat and how it compares to both the other Challengers and the external competition.
(Read More…)
“Too Poor To Drive”. This is the gut level conclusion that’s been propagated in “Generation Why” since January, 2012, long before the theory gained currency in the broader automotive world. In the nearly two years since, the “kids aren’t interested in cars because of technology/the environment/urbanization” meme has held up tenaciously – and it’s not entirely false.
Howls of protests ensued when GM stopped disclosing monthly production numbers, touching off, says Automotive News [sub], “concern among industry analysts and economists, as well as suppliers that rely on the data for their production plans.“ The industry paper explains what is wrong with this move: (Read More…)
Something I’ve long maintained (and that has been backed up by many of the B&B) is that young people still like cars and do care about them. The issue of falling car ownership among young people is largely an economic one. The cost of living is going up while wages are stagnating. Gasoline is expensive. Student debt, smartphones and rent are more important obligations than car payments, insurance and fuel. All of that can be quantified with data.
What hasn’t been so easily demonstrable was that young people still like cars, despite the wishful thinking of many who cheer for the end to the automobile era. Now we finally have some good research that backs up my gut feeling.
With China being the world’s largest car market, and the largest market of many of our carmakers, getting good and timely data is essential for stock analysts and journalists alike. Bloomberg has an exasperated story that cries about the absolute mess in China when it comes to hard data. It also describes the great lengths analysts go to when gauging Chinese car sales. No wonder the analyst reports are often messier than even the messiest Chinese data: (Read More…)
Some hackers must have some serious beef with Japanese companies. It’s getting painful. Sony, still reeling from a massive security breach, now received an invitation to a congressional grilling. Sony is not alone. Honda Canada found personal information from 283,000 Honda and Acura customers stolen. Jerry Chenkin, executive vice-president and chief compliance officer at Honda Canada Inc., confirmed to The Toronto Star “that names, addresses and vehicle identification numbers were taken from the company’s e-commerce websites myHonda and myAcura, with suspicious activity on the site first detected in late February. “ (Read More…)
A lot has changed in the auto industry in the three years since I started writing here at TTAC, and one of the more heartening developments has been the move towards ever greater transparency for all kinds of data, from sales breakouts to incentives to sales-weighted fuel economy. Though I’d like to think that TTAC played a role in helping push towards greater transparency and disclosure, the real heroes of this story are Hyundai (which has begun to release its sales-weighted fuel economy each month and is moving towards quarterly fleet sales breakouts) and TrueCar, which has possibly done more to put information in the hands of auto consumers than anyone else (TTAC included). TTAC thanks everyone who is helping push the industry towards ever more disclosure, and invites you to take advantage of these newly-available data points in order to better understand the ever-evolving face of the US auto industry. Here we present TrueCar’s TrueMPG data for April, which shows a .2 MPG improvement across the industry since April 2010.
It looks like Gawker can find solace in the reassuring fact that they are not the only ones who ended up with a purloined database, containing the privates private details of all their customers. Intimate customer data of Honda has also been robbed and plundered. See, it happens to the best of them. (Read More…)
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